5 Free Mobile-App Development eBooks

Hello everyone!

I found a very helpful site recently – The Hacker Shelf. More or less it is a collection of free ebooks which you can download or read online. Most of the books are tech/programming related. I believe it is not a surprise to you. I am writing this post because there are 5 ebooks I would like to feature here. All of them are about mobile-app development. iOS or Android. Most probably some of the books will be helpful to you.

So here it is the list with mobile-app development books I have prepared.

10 Useful Tools And Services For Mobile App Developers

Hello everyone,

This week I would like to present you 10 awesome tools and services. I really believe that they can make your life easier, boost your sales or help you in making better apps. I’m sure you will find some new and useful services.

Apptopia

Buy and sell mobile app ownership online. Apptopia markets itself as the first marketplace for app acquisitions. If you are thinking about selling one of your apps – most probably this is the right place for you. It has slick design and easy to use interface. Moreover lots of apps are already there. The site is relatively new but apps for more than $100 000 have been already sold there.

Appbackr

Crowd-funding marketplace for mobile apps. By applying the time-honored model to the digital age, Appbackr solves common funding and distribution problems of application developers. Developers sell copies of an app to wholesale buyers. That way developers receive immediate funds and buyers earn profits on their investments – usually among 20%-50%.

Mopapp

App Store Analytics. Automatically analyze reviews, ratings distribution and other customer data to calculate a unique Mopapp Sentiment Index. This measurement indicates if ratings and reviews are beneficial, or detrimental, to your app’s sales.

Chupa

The marketplace for mobile app components. Chupa is the world’s first online marketplace where developers buy and sell, from each other, cutting edge source code packages and components for a variety of Mobile development languages and frameworks. Whether you are selling your component or you would like to save time on development and buy something already done – it could be tremendously useful site for app developers. There are components for all the popular platforms and the resources are well organized.

MusicMyApp

Professional music and sound for your apps and games. Music My App is the the fastest, easiest way to provide music and sound for your apps and iBooks. You can hire them for customizable music and sounds or browse their samples for unique sound bits and clips. At MyMusicApp they are dedicated to creating unique and stand out music that goes with your unique and standout apps, iBooks or games.

GameSalad Creator

A game creation tool for people who don’t speak code. It’s just an awesome tool that helps you create powerful games with just drag-n-drop. There’s no faster or easier way to get started building a game. Avoid spending hours poring over code, and spend more time finding the fun. Moreover the whole process doesn’t stop at creating the apps – the guys behind “the game creator” have implemented awesome tools for testing and publishing the games too.

Bizness Apps

Mobile apps for businesses made easy. With the help of the “Bizness Apps” service, which focuses on small businesses, you can create, edit and manage an app without any programming knowledge. There are lots of industry specific templates among which you can choose. These include apps for – bars, restaurants, gyms, event organizers and many more. Moreover they are offering a white-labeling program by which you can start your own studio for small business orientated apps.

Urban Airship

Powering modern mobile. Urban Airship is the engine behind thousands of the world’s most successful mobile apps, providing a full suite of messaging and content delivery tools, including Push Notifications, Rich Media Messaging, In-App Purchase and Subscriptions. Their platform can help you maximize the success of your app allowing you to build a strategy that will bring people back to your app day after day, extending its life and value.

BugSense

The best real-time bug tracking service for Android, iOS & WP7. If you are building mobile apps yourself and you are not using a bug-tracker already – I would advice you to try BugSense right now. BugSense is a service that can be integrated into your apps and seamlessly provide you with near real-time crash data. Using this kind of service should be a standard part of any developer’s process. It’s really a must use service and it supports all popular mobile platforms.

Apptlantis

Your app’s web presence. Yes, this is our own tool and I really believe it will be very helpful to you. Apptlantis is among the easiest ways to supply your app with a beautiful landing page, facebook tab integration and a dedicated support section. You can choose among several themes which are highly customizable and your app will look much more professional by having that beautiful web-presence. Moreover you can find a list with more than 60 app-review websites on which you can submit your app for review.

This will be for now. I hope that at least some of the reviewed services will be helpful to you.

Stan

Re: How to incorporate a US Corporation from outside the USA?

I found a very useful article today on the topic “How to incorporate a US Corporation from outside the USA?“. It is an old one – from 2010, however it is becoming popular on HackerNews now. The main idea is that the founders of FreshDesk, located in India, wanted to support recurring subscriptions and payments in USD. In general the problem with all of this is that in order to process CreditCards you will need a suitable Merchant Account and a suitable Bank Account with which your Merchant Account provider can work and trust. However, in order to have that Bank Account you may need a physical address in a “suitable” country and also an incorporated business there. Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? And it has costed FreshDesk $1278 (back in 2010)  to do all of the above + a lot of time of course.

I wondered today, why bother with all of the above, pay that money and invest so much time when there could be a much better option now…

We at Apptlantis had the same requirement – to support recurring payments in USD. From day 1. We achieved that in about 3 days of development time (integrations) and cost-free. I’ll tell you how – with the help of SaaSy (a FastSpring company). It’s just an awesome service and their support is one of the best you can find out there. So how does the whole “magic” happen and why do we skip all the complications when using SaaSy? Well it’s because FastSpring doesn’t require a Merchant Account from you. This just saves lots of development time and headaches. You will just need a regular Bank Account from your country (almost all countries are supported) and the people of SaaSy (FastSpring) will transfer the earned money twice a month.

So, if you need just to support recurring billings in USD (and lots of other currencies) I would highly recommend giving a try to SaaSy. In fact they can be helpful to you even if you have registered a US corporation.

I hope this has been of assistance to some of you,

Stan

The discussion on HackerNews

p.s. we are not related in any way with FastStrping. Just a happy customer.

Blog digest: 5 useful iOS tutorials

As our goal is to be helpful to all of you iOS and android developers, we think it is a good idea to post compilations of useful tutorials on these topics. We believe that all of the listed articles below deserve a check.

Here they are our suggestions with iOS tutorials:

Cleanly Accessing the UITextView field in TWTweetComposeViewController

In this tutorial you will learn a simple and powerful technique how you can pre-populate the text of a Tweet while using TWTweetComposeViewController. (a tutorial by @dwsjoquist)

Importing Data Made Easy

An awesome article by Marcus Zarra, the author of “Cocoa is my girlfriend”. It’s about a new addition to the MagicalRecord library – MagicalImport. The goals of MagicalImport are: To be highly reusable; Promote maintainable import code; Not to worry about performance; Solve 90% of the importing data cases; Keep all configurations out of code; It sounds very promising, isn’t it? It’s a little bit longer tutorial but if you need a clean approach for importing data – go ahead and read it. (@mzarra)

How to Be an Indie Game Developer

A lot of games on the app store are making good amount of money these days. Have you been wondering what’s the path and approach of becoming an indie game developer? Well, the guys from @Mode7Games have published a very good reading about this. The article covers a lot of topics – The Basics, Game Design, Concept, Code, Art and Animation, Music and Audio, Business and Marketing. In general we would say that it’s a must read if you are working on the next mobile game hit .

Why landing pages matter and how they impact conversion rates

Well, this is not exactly a tutorial, it’s more like a “how to”, however we think it will be helpful to you. It’s about the importance of Landing Pages as the title suggests. If you have underestimated your landing page until now, most probably you won’t do it anymore after reading this. And if you need a professional landing page for your app – we can help you right now.

Introduction to RESTKit Tutorial

If you are working on the iOS field you are most probably reading RayWenderlinch already and may have read this. However if you haven’t – go on and read it or browse it at least. The chances that you will need to work with a remote API are very high and using the RESTKit is one of the good approaches to do that. The author, @scott4arrows,has introduced this library very well!

So, I hope you’ve enjoyed this compilation of iOS tutorials and they have been helpful to you!

Stan

Hello World!

Hello current and new friends,

I’m glad to announce that after a few months of work Apptlantis can meet the real world now. In fact, you may ask what is Apptlantis and how it can help you? It is a service that will help you with the web presence of your mobile apps. By web presence I mean all aspects of it – a beautiful landing page, contacts page, support section allowing your users to give feedback and submit issues, facebook integration, SEO optimization, user reviews and media testimonials. If you are mobile-app developer you can let us take care of your web presence and be able to focus on what you are good at – building apps.

Some people have described Apptlantis as about.me for mobile apps, however we think Apptlantis is more. It is a complete solution for creating beautiful websites for mobile apps. You can choose among 4 different themes for your apps now and their look & feel and layouts are fully customizable. Having an Apptlantis-website for your app will help it stand out compared to many others. I would advice you to check all the Features and Benefits now.

You don’t have a dedicated website for your app yet or you would like to enhance your Facebook fan page? Go on and check Appltantis now. It won’t take you more than a few minutes and will help you with extending your app’s web presence immediately.

If you have checked Apptlantis already. I would love to have your feedback. Every idea, critique and feedback would be very helpful. Thank you in advance!

I can guarantee you we will continue working hard in order to bring to you the best solution in this sphere.

Stan